Pathological Demand Avoidance

[Felaku]

Hi a close relative has started seeing a man with this condition. I've never heard of it before and there doesn't seem to be much info on it.

He seems nice enough and I like him but he has a very poor work history and a bit too reliant on his parents. He's still at home at 30ish.

She's quite successful and has her own place.

Now I do not wish to bash or disrespect those suffering with this condition but I can imagine life could get problematic in a relationship if one of the partners has it.

Any experiences to share? It's not serious at the moment but it could get that way.

Really your question is like asking how long a piece of string is.

He could be a guy who has been diagnosed with PDA and is using that diagnosis to develop a better insight into his behaviour and ways in which he can manage it.

He could be a guy with PDA who uses it to excuse his behaviour.

He could be adept at masking or masking could make it worse.

Autism, and it's different profiles, is a huge spectrum, and the people who have it vary greatly. I've worked with a handful of children with pda though and none of them have 'said no to everything'. It's an anxiety driven need for control not being purposefully obstructive.

Ohfook- there is no consensus about PDA in terms of its diagnosis, categorisation or cause, and it isn’t recognised in the international diagnostic manuals, so Tenar is correct that it isn’t (or shouldn’t be) ‘officially’ diagnosed by the NHS. That is not to say that a collection of traits that we call PDA don’t exist!

I have a dd with asd and one with adhd. They have traits of PDA (crossover is very similar)

Dd with asd needs everything in a routine cant cope well with change to her routine.

Eldest dd struggles with being told to do things so if I said 'you need to tidy your room' even if she had planned to do it that day she won't do it. So I have to say 'you room looks ready for a sort, were you thinking of doing it soon?' Or 'do you want to shower before or after me?'

I wonder what people did before this new diagnosis? Decades ago? Would this behaviour have been recognised or socialised out?

people would have struggled and not known why they struggled, as would their parents/teachers @Machiavellian

i remember being so impressed with the teacher saying to my dd, can you show us how you walk down the stairs, or something,
she had been refusing to respond to my requests.

I have lots if traits of this aswell as ADHD and ASD. I don't have an official diagnosis but 2/4 of my adult kids do with the other two showing signs but happy to not get a diagnosis.

For me it shows up as struggling with being told what to do. I can get in the car to go to a new place and put the satnav on and she says turn left and I just can't, it drives me crazy. I end up missing turns just so I can "make" the satnav recalculate and then I feel ( somewhat ridiculously) like I've won. I struggle hugely with control issues. The easiest way to get me to do something is to make a passive aggressive remark that that I could never do it and then I feel like I've got to prove you wrong. Tell me I've GOT to do something, it's vitally important and I just can't. It won't get done. Add this into the ADHD and lack of interest in doing mundane/routine every day tasks as there is zero dopamine pay off and daily life is very difficult.

Life can be very hard, I've always struggled to keep a job for more than 6 weeks but I've been very lucky that my DH supports me and unlucky in that I developed several auto immune diseases in my very early 30s so couldn't work anyway. So DH earns the money and I take care of everything else. When my heath allows to will be there impulsive home decorator, the garden designer, and the experimental chef. But on a bad day it's frozen batch cooking and DH fens for himself or we get a taste away and send dirty washing to the laundry.

Life is definitely not boring.

Did people used to just 'get on with it' instead of leaning into a potential diagnosis? It's interesting to ponder from a behavioural point of view whether people's responses/reactions/choices are affected by a label.

of course people got on with it
it is only a really recent diagnosis.

I wouldn’t be surprised if my dp has it. His job history is full of jobs he’s left as he’s fallen out with his boss. He’s fine if he can do what he wants but being told to do something leads to a row. I inevitably think his boss is right.

He insists on treating my (not his) dc as he sees fits. Far too many treats, but apparently I can’t tell him to do otherwise. He does v little around the house but moans at me about it. I’m planning on leaving.

You haven't been googling it very hard 🙄

My FIL was like that.
Obviously not diagnosed (he was 80+ when he died)

What happened?
He got a job where he was self employed and totally independent. No boss to tell him what to do.
He was of a generation where women were doing all the HW etc… so he never did anything he didn’t want to do.
And also a generation where divorce was a last resort choice so MIL accepted stuff we wouldn’t accept nowadays (or it would be seen as abusive).

Result ?
When he got ill and wasn’t able to do much, MIL comment was
‘I can finally do things my way. That’s great!!’

Probably at school the boys were the "naughty" ones who were disruptive. And children with undiagnosed PDA probably struggled a lot or became very anxious.

But as an adult where you have a lot more control over your life, there were/are probably a lot of people with PDA who just made decisions that made life more easy to cope with. e.g. being self employed, working in jobs with more autonomy, studying.

I don't think having a diagnosis changes anything. It's a nervous system disability, it affects you whether you know it exists or not.

It's also worth noting that modern life contributes in some way too. Life is busy, there are lots of pressures on children and adults that didn't exist until relatively recently in human history. I imagine people with ASD/PDA coped better with a slower pace of life.

I'm ancient and went to school in the 70s, there were definitely children back then who would receive a diagnosis of some description today. They were just considered odd or naughty or thick, my own lovely friend being among them. It must have been so hard for them, feeling different without knowing why

I should think half the population have this to some degree. Being asked/told to do something “gets their back up” or “rubs their fur the wrong way”.

Unless they are officially (as opposed to Dr Google) diagnosed with autism/learning difficulties, then it is up to the parents to help them cope with and overcome this. Relentlessly accommodating an anti-social personality trait does them no favours. And I speak as someone with a sibling who had this and multiple other issues.

I work with children and their families/carers and many of the young people who are ND also have the PDA profile. Working with them is very very challenging and its worrying that they may not be able to cope with society's expectations and engage with harmonious relationships as adults. The prognosis is quite poor. We quite often have forensic CAMHS involved who provide consultation to the carer/staff caring for the child but quite often these children struggle to maintain placements or remain at home.

I think whether he does or doesnt have a particular issue or diagnosis the fact he still lives at home at his age means perhaps hes not quite ready to enter the adult world

All humans will avoid demands in certain situations. People with asd will also often be demand avoidant without being pda, but PDA is a whole level of demand avoidance above that. Its not being asked to do something rubs them up the wrong way. They might even find feeling hungry is a demand and then not be able to eat as an example.

Remember those in life who are considered dropouts or losers, those who find life so difficult they end up going off the rails and measures to help them typically end up failing? Kicked out of school or just dropping out.
Prisons are full of young men with undiagnosed SN, I’d hazard a guess that some/plenty have PDA.
They’ve always been around, but not in a way that would have been recognised as being disabled.
I remember reading that PDA presenting autism was written about by Asperger, but that those who translated his works left it out because it didn’t apply to their children.

It’s often said that PDA is one of the most difficult presentations of autism to parent and support. Most cannot handle school or bog standard parenting.

I have two PDA dc (now adult) and I know a few people married to suspected PDAers. Most ended in tears because the behaviour of the husbands (weirdly PDA women seem to find ways to self manage better) can easily be perceived as controlling and abusive.

I have ptsd from the full on parenting days. I know some PDAers are much gentler and easy going than my dc were, but I wouldn’t risk a relationship as you’d probably have to be prepared to be in a caring/facilitating role a lot of the time, and I’m not sure you could rely on your PDA partner to reciprocate in times where you’d typically need it eg if you choose to have children, or are ill and need looking after etc.

Aldo, those saying it’s not recognised - it is, and is diagnosed by the NHS as well.

@MaturingCheeseball

I should think half the population have this to some degree. Being asked/told to do something “gets their back up” or “rubs their fur the wrong way”.

This is a really crap thing to say which totally belittles the reality of PDA.
Similar to saying something daft like “I know what it’s like to be blind because I have to
wear glasses”.

Having PDA isn’t about being rubbed the wrong way, it can be severely disabling. Imagine having to find ways to manage getting a distressed child to drink because the demand of being thirsty is too much for them. It is not about being pissed off sometimes because things don’t go their way 🙄

Due to inconsistency in diagnosis, some very unstable, dangerous people are being described as having this profile. In others it seems more rooted in anxiety, can be related to fear of failure. In UK it’s not a diagnosis as such. It’s hard to tell due to the market being swamped with private diagnosis that are not reliable.

I find PDA an odd label.

I think it's a combination of all the executive functions - brainstorming, planning resources, knowing skills to apply, breaking down steps to take, getting started, checking progress, overcoming challenges etc. It needs a kind of coaching approach but the person has to be engaged, it has to be a goal they care about.

I think the ‘outcome’ depended to some extent on the degree to which the behaviours affected other people. Very violent and aggressive sufferers would be institutionalised or they would be identified as ‘criminals’, and the penal
system would come into play. Our prosperity and esteem for medical science has resulted in different societal and to some extent personal reactions.

I think that the hardships and uncertainties of life in previous eras probably affected people with these sorts of conditions more than average. Autism has a higher occurrence amongst people who have endured difficult or very premature births, or so I have read. So very few of these individuals would have survived into childhood. I also suspect that the desperate priorities of survival amongst the rural or industrialised poor would have been disproportionately felt by sufferers from these conditions. There just wasn’t the time or money to prioritise looking after a child who would ‘wander off’ or refuse to follow the leader on the forest trail or the harvesting field.

The more prosperous were able to provide more shelter ( though whether they always did is debatable).

There just wasn’t the time or money to prioritise looking after a child who would ‘wander off’ or refuse to follow the leader on the forest trail or the harvesting field.

But conversely, children with ASD or PDA may have thrived in a simpler society. They would have been outdoors more, doing physical jobs, and therefore less stressed and less likely to have a need to control things. They weren't confined to a classroom or office where they have to navigate social niceties and other things they find more challenging.

Realistically though, life is full of having to work towards goals we don't really care about.

We have to bring the washing in, pay bills, sit through meetings.

I get that chasing dopamine hits helps people focus and contribute but it would be very hard to deal with in a partner.

Some stuff is boring but necessary and it's a lot of emotional labour to try and make everything engaging and fun for your partner when really you just want them to do the f$&king dishes while you fold the laundry so you can rest at some point.

Your friend may benefit from learning about attachment styles

Does she ever want to have kids? One of the most important things you can do for your kids is to try to choose a good father. Is there a genetic predisposition for PDA.
Does it make it challenging parenting when you have PDA?